South African photographer Guy Tillim was named the winner of the 2017 HCB Award, presented by the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, for his “Museum of the Revolution” project, which documents residual signs of revolution and colonialism across cities in Africa.

The HCB Award supports the creation of a photography project which could not be achieved without this help. It is intended for a photographer who has already completed a significant body of work, close to the documentary approach. The prize includes an exhibition at the foundation in Paris and funding towards the publication of a book.

Born in Johannesburg in 1962, Guy Tillim discovered photography in 1986 and worked for four years with the collective Afrapix. As an independent photographer, he leads missions in Africa for Reuters and AFP. In 2002, he received the SCAM Roger Pic Award. In 2006, he was the first recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship Award from the Harvard Museum of Photography.

With Museum of the Revolution, Guy Tillim looks at the streets of Maputo, Nairobi, Harare and tries to unveil both the inheritance of past and present history. Their arteries bear the traces of the colonialist past, their Marxist heritage, slightly shifting to economic liberalism these past years. As Clément Chéroux describes his work, Guy “Tillim is interested here in the urban space as an area of inscription in which the traces of the colonial past reveal themselves and where the new political orientations assert themselves. ‘After David Goldblatt, who profoundly marked the South African photographic scene of the 1990s and 2000s. ”

The HCB Award jury comprised Clément Chéroux, the director of the department of photography at SF MoMA; Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès; Lorenza Bravetta, an adviser to Italy’s Culture Minister Dario Franceschini; Florian Ebner, the director of the office of photography at the Center Pompidou; Nathalie Giraudeau, the director of Ile de France Photography Center in Paris; Thyago Nogueira, the director of the department of contemporary photography at Instituto Moreira Salles and publisher of ZUM magazine in São Paulo; and Agnès Sire, director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

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